


children of dust and ash

by callunavulgari



Category: Bartimaeus - Jonathan Stroud
Genre: Canonical Character Death, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Implied Sexual Content, Multi, Post Ptolemy's Gate
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-23
Updated: 2019-02-23
Packaged: 2019-11-04 14:53:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,801
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17900216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/callunavulgari/pseuds/callunavulgari
Summary: Kitty summons Bartimaeus on a chilly fall day in her thirty-eighth year. Her children are at school. There is no husband. She is alone in the house, save for a fat persian who slumbers happily on a cushion in the window seat downstairs. The persian, she knows, will not wake before noon.The words are familiar to her, and she does not stumble over them. Smoke billows into the room, as expected, but instead of a creeping sulfurous stench, there is the faint smell of sandalwood and wet earth.When the smoke clears, Bartimaeus is there.





	children of dust and ash

**Author's Note:**

> I made the mistake of rereading these books. I have feels again. We'll see if I also write the one where Bartimaeus dances with Nathaniel in front of the entire government. Obvious spoilers for the end of the books.

Kitty Jones is thirty-eight before she has the strength to summon Bartimaeus again. It is not, strictly speaking, a physical strength that she lacks, though her trip through the gate did weaken her considerably.

No, it wasn’t that. Instead, she found herself in the years afterwards hesitating over every circle, every lit candle, or lingering smell of incense. It was the doubt, see. The grief, lurking about her like a bad smell. For all that she never knew Nathaniel the way she would have liked to, she still mourned him.

They had erected a statue of him where he’d died, once they had cleared away the rubble. It wasn’t very accurate. In life, his nose had been longer.

They took all of his prettiest features and polished them to a shine. His statue didn’t have greasy hair or a smarmy smirk. His face lacked the sharpness that his adult visage had held. There were no moles dotted across the back of his neck like constellations, only just obscured by the collar of his shirt.

In short, the statue was wildly exaggerated. It shone in the sun, larger than life, a barely familiar boy that had died too soon, who went to his death with a grim smile on his handsome face and a staff in hand.

(That part, she supposed, was true enough. Though if she knew Bartimaeus at all she would be willing to bet that it wasn’t all stoic determination until the end. There was bound to have been a raspberry or two thrown in there somewhere.)

Kitty summons Bartimaeus on a chilly fall day in her thirty-eighth year. Her children are at school. There is no husband. She is alone in the house, save for a fat persian who slumbers happily on a cushion in the window seat downstairs. The persian, she knows, will not wake before noon.

The words are familiar to her, and she does not stumble over them. Smoke billows into the room, as expected, but instead of a creeping sulfurous stench, there is the faint smell of sandalwood and wet earth.

When the smoke clears, Bartimaeus is there.

He sits in the circle, gazing outwards at her. He wears Ptolemy’s form, skirt tucked neatly over his knees. There is fire in his eyes.

“Hello, Kitty,” he says, and it is like no time has passed at all.

“Hello, Bartimaeus,” she replies, and blinks at him.

She’s prepared herself for this moment going on two decades, and now that it is here, she finds that she doesn’t quite know what to say. She licks her dry lips and shifts uncomfortably in her circle. The grandfather clock down the hall is loud enough that she can feel it in her bones. Her stomach gurgles, and she finds herself in want of a biscuit.

While Kitty is watching him, Bartimaeus is watching her. Ptolemy’s eyes flick up and down her frame, as if checking her for defects. At last, he smiles. It isn’t a nice one, too sharp at the corners by far, but she recognizes it for what it is. She knows whose smile he wears.

“You look well,” he says, and Kitty knows what he means. Her hair is still gray, her face still lined, but she is not so old as she once was. Nathaniel was right about that - it _had_ faded over time.

A flicker of a smile crosses her lips. “You do, too.”

They lapse into a brief moment of repose, gazing at each other. She wonders what he sees.

He sighs after a long moment, and reclines lazily in his pentacle. The stiffness has gone out of his spine, but she knows how each moment must ache for him. She hopes it is worth it. That he isn’t angry with her.

“You must want to know,” he says after another long minute passes by in silence. “So ask.”

She shakes her head. “I can guess.”

Ptolemy’s form jerks like she’d hit him, and as she watches, Ptolemy melts away. She had expected it, but it’s still a shock to see Nathaniel sitting there before her. Her memories had not been wrong, his nose _had_ been longer in life.

Bartimaeus looks down at the hands he wears, and grunts with something like disapproval. He fans them out, wiggles the fingers, clenches them until the knuckles go white. Even as she watches Bartimaeus is adding details that she’d long forgotten - freckles and moles winking into existence against a backdrop of pale skin. A cowlick appears at the top of his head. The bones of his face shift in minute increments. The color of his eyes go a shade darker.

It is like watching an unfocused picture coming into sharp relief.

“Better,” Bartimaeus says once he’s done. He glances up at her, from under sooty dark eyelashes. “Don’t suppose you’ve got a mirror anywhere?”

Kitty nods, and without stopping to second guess herself, steps smartly out of her circle. Nathaniel’s form goes still behind her. She can see it out of the corner of her eye, feel the hairs at the back of her neck stand on end, and knows that Bartimaeus is watching her. But she does not stop, does not blink, does not react.

She crosses to the desk, and returns bearing a small compact. It won’t work if he wishes to inspect the _entire_ form, but it will have to do for now. She passes it to him, and their fingers brush together. His fingers twitch.

“Hm,” Bartimaeus breathes, prodding at Nathaniel’s cheeks. He draws his lips back to inspect the gums. She watches with amusement as a small cavity appears in his back left molar.

“You aren’t in your pentacle, Kitty,” Bartimaeus tells her, still inspecting himself. He makes faces at the mirror, twisting Nathaniel’s visage into expressions she never could have imagined him making in real life. It is more surreal than watching him argue with himself near the end.

“No,” she says with a shrug. She peers down at him, puts her hands on her hips. “Do I need to be?”

He stares up at her for a moment, then slowly - ever so slowly - unfolds Nathaniel’s body. She’d forgotten how tall and thin he was. His eyes are dark, narrowed, still locked on hers. He steps out of his own pentacle, a step closer than she would like him. Her breathing goes a bit short and she swallows, throat working, but refuses to let herself appear afraid.

“Hm,” Bartimaeus hums again, barely even a step away. One of Nathaniel’s fingers come up beneath her chin, and carefully tips it upwards. He turns her head first one way, then the other, eyes peering at her all the while. She does not know what he is thinking, but she lets him do it, heart thundering against her ribs. She can feel his breath on her face.

The finger under her chin becomes two, then three, and as she watches, something in that face gentles. The hand slides from her chin to her jaw, cradling it in some kind of imitation of a caress.

Bartimaeus smiles at her with Nathaniel’s face. Kitty’s pulse is throbbing beneath his hands.

He looks at her, and she knows what he sees.

She looks at him, and sees exactly what he _wants_ her to see.

He leans closer, until she could count his lashes if she wanted, and tips his head in an inquiring manner.

“Would you like..” he starts to ask, eyes flickering down to her mouth.

She licks her lips, and breathless, nods. Then says, in a creaking, whispery sort of voice, “Yes. Please.”

 

Some hours later, they lie together in a patch of sunlight. There are blankets tangled around their thighs. Nathaniel’s fingers are in her hair, idly twirling the gray strands into curls. The persian that had been napping is awake now, glaring up at them from his spot on the rug. Her children will be home in several hours.

Beneath her ribs she feels aching and bruised, her heart too full.

Bartimaeus is watching her with Nathaniel’s eyes. She can feel them on her, so she turns to look at him. His lips twitch upwards into something resembling a smile. He is still playing with her hair.

“Bartimaeus,” she says, and the smile widens.

“Oh good,” he says, eyes glimmering with amusement. “You _do_ remember my name. You lost track of it for a bit earlier.”

Her eyes narrow. He had wanted her to forget. For some time, she thinks that he may have lost track of it, as well. She doesn’t remark on it. Instead, she stays silent until he rolls his eyes and says, “All right, all right, leave off. What were you going to say?”

“I was going to ask for your permission to call upon you again.”

He leers at her, eyes flicking pointedly down the long, naked stretch of their bodies. “For this? Got an itch that needs scratched, Kitty, dearest?”

She shrugs, refusing to be cowed.

“Yes,” she says simply. “For this. And other things. I missed talking with you.”

He curls Nathaniel’s face into his best sneer. It’s a good one. She remembers it, vividly. “Talking with _me_? Or talking with _him_?”

Her lips twitch. “You, mostly. You know better than I do that Nathaniel wasn’t much of a conversationalist.”

Bartimaeus takes a deep breath, Nathaniel’s chest puffing up, and then he deflates, slumping back against the cushions and throwing an arm across his eyes.

“He _could_ be one though,” he murmurs, a hint of wistfulness in his voice. “That’s the thing. Getting the stick out of his rump long enough was the tricky part, but there were quite a few occasions. Our boy Nathaniel could debate for _hours_. I am sorry you didn’t get to see that. You would have laid him out flat.”

A fond smile curves it’s way across his lips, and Bartimaeus lifts a knobby elbow to squint out at her from beneath the arm.

“Yes, Kitty,” he tells her with a sigh. “You can call on me whenever you like.”

She smiles at him. “Even for this?”

Mockingly, she gestures to the long, naked stretch of their bodies, and the scant space between them.

He snorts, and leans over to place a small, fond kiss against her brow.

“Yes,” he says. He kisses her again, sweetly, on the mouth. The kiss lingers, and for a moment, threatens to turn into something more, her mouth open against his, his hand clutching low on her hip- but she turns away from it at the last minute.

His eyes are glazed, his mouth red. A hand smooths down her side. He grins a bit, lopsided.

“Keep me wanting,” she breathes, and he laughs.

She speaks the words of dismissal. He goes.


End file.
